What is Heart Failure and How it Manifests Throughout the Body?

What are the Causes of Heart Failure?

The most common cause of heart failure is the damage to the muscles of your heart, as a result of previous heart attacks. However, there is an increasing evidence that sleep apnea has a link with heartfailure.

For example, a recent study shows that patients with severe and
moderate obstructive sleep apnea had higher left ventricular mass and
left ventricular mass index, and left ventricular global dysfunction.

If you have central apnea, your situation can be more dangerous compared with people who have obstructive apnea. Most individuals with
central sleep apnea have heart failure, and they also have an increased risk of death.

The severity of sleep apnea goes hand in hand with the severity of heart failure. As you probably know, sleep apnea can:

increase blood pressure,

impair ventricular function,

increase pulmonary artery pressure,

cause diabetes, when your risk for heart failure can be eight times greater that of someone who doesn't have diabetes.

Heart Failure Treatment

If you think you have symptoms of heart failure, pick up the phone and schedule an immediate appointment with your doctor to evaluate your symptoms. And if you have sleep apnea, you should tell him about your sleep problem, too.

Heart failure is sometimes only a side effect from a serious disorder, and treating your heart with medications and surgery will not be complete without treating that serious disorder.

Sleep related breathing disorders are highly prevalent in patients with
established cardiovascular disease, and you learned that central sleep
apnea occurs mainly in patients with heart failure.

Treatment Options for Congestive Heart Failure

If you have obstructive sleep apnea, you want to reduce weight
and to abstain from alcohol and sedatives which may cause pharyngeal
collapse during sleep. These general measures may reduce the severity of
your heart failure and the severity of obstructive apnea.

Treating apnea in sleep may be relevant in patients with heart failure and
sleep disorders. However, this does not imply that all patients with
hypertension, atrial fibrillation, angina, or heart failure should be
treated the same way.

There is no evidence that specific drugs used to treat heart failure have any direct influence on the severity of sleep apnea.

In general, once the disease takes hold of your heart, the most common
interventions are drugs and surgery. But if you have sleep apnea, you may discover that heart failure will improve during the apnea treatment.

Moreover, lifestyle changes are an
element of intervention in helping your heart, too.

Natural Remedies for Heart Failure

However, if you want to use herbal or natural remedies as part of
your treatment program, you need to know that some substances have
harmful effects in combination with medications to treat heart problems
or when heart disease exists.